Information Retrieval and Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

Information Retrieval and Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

Information Retrieval is an interdisciplinary area which corresponds to the process of finding relevant information units that satisfy an information need from a collection of information sources. The data is usually text although the increasing use of the web as a data repository has led to the inclusion of multimedia data such as images, videos, and sound where exact matches are replaced by similarity searches. The main component of the retrieval is a search which is facilitated by imposing an index on the underlying data. The growth of the web and the increasing popularity of smartphones and the embedding of GPS in these devices has led to the increasing importance of location as a component of all types of data and when coupled with this data is known as spatial data. Database systems that deal with spatial data and its retrieval are known as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and the department has been in the forefront of dealing with this type of data for over 50 years.